Generating a lighting plan for a large area installation is a useful operation for many reasons.
Monitoring or managing a large (retail) area filled with many light units (for example 500 to 1500 light units within a 50 m2 area) benefits from an accurately determined lighting plan. For example for commissioning purposes the lighting plan may be checked against the installation plan to determine whether all of the light units have been correctly installed. Similarly for inspection purposes the lighting plan may be compared against a previously determined lighting plan to check whether there has been a change in the performance of the light units and thus identify where light units should be replaced or repaired.
Furthermore the accurately determined lighting plan may have other uses such as enabling an indoor positioning system. The indoor positioning system may allow users to identify their location relative to a ‘known’ position of the light units determined from the lighting plan. The indoor positioning system may for ‘internal space’ applications provide superior performance over conventional radio frequency positioning systems such as satellite (GPS) and/or cellular positioning systems.
Although an initial installation plan may provide an expected lighting plan, this initial lighting plan may comprise errors. For example light units may be installed at different locations to the originally planned location (for example because of some structural problem in the building). Similarly some light units may be incorrectly installed or swapped with other light units during the lighting system installation process.
The initial lighting plan may therefore not be suitable for the task it is to be used in. For example in an indoor positioning system the lighting plan should have the position of the light units to within 10 to 20 cm in the X, Y and Z dimensions.
Such errors therefore require a post installation lighting plan to be determined. Conventionally this is generated manually and often by using a paper version of the installation plan as a template, a device to identify the light (when located underneath the light unit) and a pen or marker to mark up any changes on the template. This is both time consuming, costly, inflexible and is also prone to mistakes.
For example once a lighting system has been commissioned the generated light map may be checked or inspected on a regular basis to determine whether the light units are still working and/or in the correct position. The inspection of installed light units and the generation of a report including the brand, quantity, status, energy usage of the lighting system based on the inspection would be similarly both time consuming and prone to mistakes.